INTERPRETING LORNA SIMPSON
by Sandra Koon
Enigmatic yet evocative.
That’s the challenge of Lorna Simpson’s Untitled (the failure of Sylvester
(2003.4), a recent addition to the New Acquisitions Gallery. Nearly identical
black and white photographs of a black woman in profile or three-quarter view
are repeated in purposeful patterns. Who is she? We can easily see
her in fourteen images, some in oval frames like Victorian
daguerreotypes. She hides behind Plexiglas in four shadowed frames. Would
we recognize her if the Plexiglas were lifted? Is she hidden behind the
one totally obscured frame in the middle? The photos remind us of scissor-cut
silhouettes or the ancient bust of Queen Nefertiti. Is there meaning in
the arrangement of the photos? Look at the text -- black lower-case words
and phrases seemingly unrelated to each other or to the images. We search
for meaning, just as Lorna Simpson intends.
 |
| Untitled (the failure of Sylvester) |
Simpson was born in Brooklyn in 1960 and grew up in Queens .
Raised during the civil rights movement, she was interested in books by
African-American authors about their struggle for equality. This early
interest in human rights became a central theme of her artwork. She
earned a BFA in photography in 1982 from the School of Visual Arts New York City University of California San Diego
Simpson combines images and
text to comment on issues of gender, race, identity and interpersonal
communication and relationships. She makes her figures universal by
abstracting the images, never showing the whole person, eliminating all
information or clues to that person. The female form is a staple of her
iconography. She inserts her own text, or as she says, “my own specific reading
of the images” to give the viewer a clue to something he might not otherwise
interpret. She often uses the discrepancy between text and image to
emphasize stereotypical conclusions many people draw, especially about women’s
place in society and about race. She says,
For me, the
specter of race looms so large because this is a culture where using the black
figure takes on very particular meanings, even stereotypes. But if
I was a white artist using Caucasian models, then the work
would be read as completely universalist. It would be construed quite
differently.
Consider her work entitled Twenty
Questions (A Sampler). Four circular photographs showing the back of
the head and shoulders of a black woman wearing a white sleeveless top are
accompanied by five questions: “Is she pretty as a picture/Or clear as
crystal/Or white as a lily/Or black as coal/Or sharp as a razor.” What
does each phrase mean to us? Do we link photo and phrase? Would we
visualize different images if we read the phrases without the photos?
Simpson
intends her work to produce doubts and questions. She wants us to participate in constructing meaning. She never
tells the whole story; instead, she forces us to complete it in a way that
draws attention to our belief systems. For example, by always
photographing the figure from the back, she says,
The
viewer wants so much to see a face to read “the look
in the eyes” or the expression on the mouth. I want viewers
to realize that that is one of the mechanisms they use to read a
photograph. If they think, “How am I supposed to read this if I
don’t see the face?” they may realize that they are making acultural
reading that has been learned over the years and then
perhaps see that it is not a given.
Untitled is one of a series of 12 works combining images and
text which Simpson completed in the fall of 2001. Each uses the same
images, but arranged differently and with different text. All are titled “Untitled”
with intriguing phrases in parentheses, such as “cabin in the sky” or “guess
who’s coming to dinner” or “the bride or the beloved.” MAG’s the
failure of Sylvester, according to the accompanying label, refers to a
young African-American, the model for a painting by Robert Henri. Sylvester has
fallen asleep—has ‘failed’ as a model. Simpson includes words and phrases
in her work that are allusions to mainstream perceptions of the
African-American and are often drawn from film, popular culture and personal
narrative. She chooses these for the body of Untitled:
the failure of Sylvester
octoroon two old women minnie
woman holding a jug self portrait troubador self portrait self portrait artist’s life no. 1 nude john
brown mom and dad I’ve been in some big towns constance jeannie mable two girls family no. 9 wanted poster no. 3 man
standing on his head wanted poster no.
17 harriet willy j
What meaning can we
make? “Self portrait” is repeated three times—is this a clue?
Maybe. “Octoroon” is a term for someone who has one black great grandparent and
no other black ancestors. Look at the purposeful arrangement of
images again. Seven black and white images in a rectangle plus four in
shadow and one blank square. Do the four in shadow represent a quadroon?
Does the blank square represent the eventual loss of black identity? Is
it helpful to know that Simpson’s partner is artist photographer James
Casebere, a Caucasian, and they are the parents of daughter Zora Simpson
Casebere? Too literal an interpretation? Your turn to try.
********
In asking us to examine how we
read others through physical characteristics, clothing, gesture, Simpson’s work
can be compared on gallery tours to that of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Famous
Names (98.39). Smith uses collaged photos to show stereotyped
ways white culture has viewed Native Americans and she uses text to show the
names Native Americans give one another.
Source: Gumbo Ya
Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists (various
authors); Henry M. Sayre, A World of Art; exhibition catalogue Centric
38: Lorna Simpson, University Art Museum, California State University Long
Beach, 1990; “Turning Down the Stereotypes,” ARTNews, September 2002;
“Fragmented Documents,” selections from The Art Institute of Chicago “African-Americans
in Art”, Museum Studies; “Questioning Documentary,” Aperture No. 112, Fall
1988; various museum and gallery websites.
No comments:
Post a Comment